Hello. I am no newb on OO programming, but I am faced with a puzzling situation. I have been given a program to work on and extend, but the previous developers didn't seem that comfortable with OO, it seems they either had a C background or an unclear understanding of OO. Now, I don't suggest I am a better developer, I just think that I can spot some common OO errors. The difficult task is how to amend them.

In my case, I see a lot of this:

        if (ret == 1) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 2) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 3) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 0) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 5) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 6) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        } else if (ret == 7) {
            out.print("yadda yadda");
        }

ret is a value returned by a function, in which all Exceptions are swallowed, and in the catch blocks, the above values are returned explicitly. Oftentimes, the Exceptions are simply swallowed, with empty catch blocks.

It's obvious that swalllowing exceptions is wrong OO design. My question concerns the use of return values. I believe that too is wrong, however I think that using Exceptions for control flow is equally wrong, and I can't think of anything to replace the above in a correct, OO manner.

Your input, please?